Barbie. $162 million. What I explained to the children about marketing.
The year's biggest opening
Barbie opened last Friday. $162 million in the United States in three days. The biggest opening of 2023. My daughter wanted to see it. We went on Saturday morning, the only session that had tickets left at a reasonable hour, and the cinema was the most pink I have ever seen a cinema.
She loved it. I'm not going to tell you what I thought of it as a film because this newsletter is not about film criticism and also because my opinion is complicated. What I want to tell you is what happened on the way home.
She was describing her favourite scenes. I was listening. And then she said: 'It's weird that I've wanted the doll my whole life and now I want one even more after seeing the film that's kind of making fun of the doll.'
She's twelve. She had just described, with considerable precision, the central mechanism of the Barbie marketing campaign.
I said: that's actually what good marketing does. She said: what do you mean? And then we had, for about forty minutes in the car, one of the most interesting conversations we've ever had.
She wanted to know more. Not about Barbie specifically β about how the mechanism works. How do you make people want to be part of something? I said: you make the something feel like it already belongs to them, before they've paid for it. She thought about this. Then: 'Is that what TikTok does?' Yes. Exactly that.
She's twelve. She figured it out herself.
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